


I'm Beginning to Think I Imagined You all Along

by Hellcat_Spangled_Shimmer_Trap



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Destiel - Freeform, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-25
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 13:30:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/698791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hellcat_Spangled_Shimmer_Trap/pseuds/Hellcat_Spangled_Shimmer_Trap
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no exorcism for desire. Dean thinks about Cas and suffers agonies of confusion, shame, and frustration.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Beginning to Think I Imagined You all Along

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Arctic Monkeys song "Cornerstone", all about hanging around a bar, pretending somebody is someone else. Which is what Dean does in this story.

Dean was sitting at the bar and his body was aching; the bruises, the cuts, the sore muscles, but mostly it was aching to be used, to move, to act, to do anything except sit here and let the thoughts catch up. He stared at the ice at the bottom of the glass and such utter meaninglessness swept over him that he could barely breathe. The dim lights turned unbearably dull, the taste in his mouth was bitter. He gestured for another drink and downed it, looking around the bar for a woman who would catch his eye. They were all so… boring. The tall skinny blonde’s hair was obviously dyed, the redhead in the corner had breasts that looked grossly swollen and about to fall out of her shirt, the short blonde was fiddling nervously with her glass, and on and on. Dean closed his eyes, his heart racing with impatience and irritation. He opened his eyes again and looked around for someone who he could settle for. And then he saw her and his heart jumped into his mouth in a little twitch of desire, because she was so much like someone else, so close, so fucking close that someone else fluttered on the edge of his mind, on the tip of his tongue, but he pushed the knowledge and the name and the face away.

She was pretty tall for a woman, and had pixie-cut brown hair. He couldn’t even see her face properly at the angle she was sitting but it had to be her. She was wearing a white dress shirt that looked a little masculine. Dean came over slowly. She had full red lips and big blue eyes. This was annoying but her hair he liked. He felt the smile on his face like a habit, totally automatic.

“Hey, can I buy you a drink?” he asked, leaning against the bar.

She smiled. She had a pristine smile, a wall of perfect white teeth. “I don’t know, can you?”

There was some relief in this, in this doing of something. He purposefully steered himself away from thinking, from wanting. Because every inch of him was swallowed up with longing, with want. This urge for something was consuming him, and he was afraid. All he wanted to do was run fast enough to get away from it, but sometimes he ran out of places to run because all he found was himself and his eternal desire and his wanting. He continued the conversation on autopilot, finding himself moving through the familiar gestures, phrases, looks, and then touches, caresses, sensations. It was all very far away but very reassuring, that she reacted to the things he did exactly the way she was supposed to. It was like checking that the world was still right side up.

They were in her apartment and she was lying beneath him on the bed and he shut his eyes and ran his fingers through the short hair, feeling it yield and spring back up again. His very lungs ached suddenly with desperate longing and the knowledge that he would never have it. The feeling of that hair under his hand was undeniable. His flesh was starved for it, longed for the touch of someone else’s hair. And in his mind, he magnified this moment, stretched it out, embellished it until he almost believed. 

But it could never be the real thing. He couldn’t quite see the face, it was slipping away from his memory, he realized in a slight panic. He closed his eyes tighter and tried to visualize the face that haunted the edges of his mind. The sharp nose, the small, slightly full lips, the impassive, endlessly calm eyes. But the face didn’t quite come together and Dean was panicking, because maybe he’ll forget that face completely, maybe he’ll never see it again. He could visualize each feature, but somehow they didn’t fit together and he was lost, kissing the girl desperately, envisioning another’s face.

And he had to admit it, there was no escaping it, he was thinking of Cas, he wanted it to be Cas. He ran his hand through her hair again and willed it to be Cas. Dean abandoned all thought, all reason, he didn’t care that this was wrong, that this was crazy. He was in love with an angel. A male angel. Maybe the male part didn’t count because Cas isn’t actually human. Maybe he’s more like a girl trapped in a guy’s body. He needed to quit making excuses. He was into Cas. His thoughts were racing and he didn’t stop kissing and moving and touching hungrily. His thoughts were desperate, they ricocheted from one side of his brain to the other and his movements became more and more insistent, more and more frenzied. He had to burn off this desire, burn it from his skin. He felt the body beneath him buck and arch, felt fingers digging into his back and imagined with all his strength that it was Cas. There, he admitted it. He wanted it to be Cas. For a second, he almost believed it was, and just that thought was enough.

“Who’s Cas?” the girl, whose name was incidentally Daisy, asked.

“What?” Dean gasped. His mind flashed into panic for a second before he realized he must have called out Cas’s name. He laughed, taking the bitterness carefully out of the sound and swallowing it. And he spun a long story about a girl named Cassie who he’d lost his virginity to at the age of fourteen, and that Daisy looked “just like her, same freckles and everything.” Daisy laughed it off, she was a nice girl, Dean reflected absently as she fell asleep against his chest. 

Emptiness and sickness washed over him and the world seemed huge, and he a tiny speck in it. That was what he must look like to Cas. An insignificant little creature. Why anyone would waste these waves, these oceans of pain on so pitiful a being he didn’t understand. His heart was an echoing box of tight-wound agony, his body burning to shake off the desire and the pain that came with futility. It felt like beating his fists raw against a wall, like tearing his fingernails to shreds against unyielding metal. Every second, he thought he couldn’t bear it any further, but somehow he kept going. No matter where he opened his eyes on a new morning, he was confronted with the same inescapable, deep-lodged dissatisfaction, stuck so deep that it made his bones hurt. Surely someday soon his heart would simply explode from frustration and unfulfilled desire, if his near-constant drinking didn’t get his liver first.

The shame of it burned into him like a brand, he couldn’t get away from the knowledge that he was into his friend, his male friend. He wanted to both efface the desire forever and to satisfy it to the utmost. He wished there was an exorcism for this.


End file.
